Determination of the land use structure in the Buzuluk River basin

The paper analyzes the structure of land use in the Buzuluk River basin (north of the Volgograd region) to identify problem areas. The study was conducted using the method of visual expert decoding of Earth remote sensing data (multispectral satellite images of Landsat with a spatial resolution of 30 m in a combination of channels – natural colors (red, blue, green spectral channels)) and geoinformation processing of the digital terrain model (SRTM with a spatial resolution of 30 m). As a result of the research, the key aspects and patterns characterizing the general structure in the use of land resources were identified. The data made it possible to identify the predominant uses of agricultural land (arable land), the proportion of fallow lands, and to identify patterns in the spatial position of residential areas and preserved forests.